Monitoring, tracking, and caring for patients—such as patients requiring monitoring under a court order, or patient with disabilities, chronic medical conditions, or pre and post surgery—requires continuous attention to resources which are often unavailable or unaffordable. Such problems may be exacerbated when patient are remotely located, or have chronic conditions that require long term continuous monitoring. The problem may also arise when conducting clinical trials where the care providers must monitor patient frequently, continuously and in real-time. The current solutions are limited because they only monitor one data at a time and do not have the capability of correlating the combination of the data.
Examples of problems addressed by this invention include:
Current methods of providing medical attention to chronically ill patients, or patient that have cognitive deficiencies due to age and/or other disabilities or during pre and post surgery requires the patient to remain in close proximity to medical staff, equipment, and hospital or medical facilities. This means that a patient must stay in a hospital or care home, resulting in excessive costs as well as the loss of independence.
Many epilepsy patient are unable to live untethered lives; preventing them from activities such as driving, bicycling, hiking, walking alone, living alone, holding jobs, and generally experiencing a normal independent life.
Medical staffs often have too many patients to keep track of changing conditions that may result in a patient requiring urgent attention or a change in care or medication.
The process of manually documenting/recording patient data often results in entry errors, loss of data, security violations, or a loss of the correlation between the patient data and the correct patient. These types of errors result in inefficiencies, or worse, incorrect procedures or prescriptions.
Universal worldwide immediate accessibility of current patient data continues to be a problem. The current trend of a patient being assigned to a pool of medical staff, versus being assigned a single caregiver, complicates the ability of having access to readily available current medical records. This is further complicated by the fact that the pool of medical personnel may reside in disparate distant geographic locations.
Remote rural patients have to travel long distances to access medical care for routine visits/tests, or to be monitored for extended periods of time. This problem also persists in urban areas where crowded cities with extensive traffic and sparse parking make it equally difficult to obtain medical care.
Individuals under court order, requiring monitoring for illegal substances or under house arrest, are currently able to easily disable or circumvent the monitoring equipment, preventing authorities from enforcing the intended court intentions.
Not knowing the location or physical/medical status of a child or loved one can cause stress and anxiety. Individuals in need of police or emergency medical assistance will often not receive prompt help, or may never receive needed help.
Patient/client data that is being remotely recorded (away from the security of a physical facility) can be lost or stolen, resulting in release of confidential patient/client information.
Not having information on the patient's status, both qualitative and quantitative (simultaneously captured/recorded, sometimes for an extended continuous period), prevents an informed decision from being made that would otherwise result in an early diagnosis or proactive action. For example, having simultaneous access to a patient's blood oxygen, weight, heart rate, activity level, etc., could be used for early prevention/detection of a heart attack.
Detecting the basal temperature of both humans and other animals continues to be problematic. Being able to continuously monitor and record temperature (while awake or asleep) can be used to detect ovulation, as well as provide an indicator for certain disorders such as thyroid.
Home/remote care of patients often requires knowledge of how to setup/program/configure/operate complex medical equipment, often beyond the capabilities of the patient. For example, administering the dosage of infusion pumps used to dispense insulin, providing chemotherapies, nitro derivatives, anti-thrombotics, etc.
Managing patients in home or remote settings is currently impractical in cases where the medical condition may not require any intervention for extended periods, but can change quickly requiring an immediate response or a medical emergency requiring the immediate attention/intervention of medical personnel. This requires the ability to monitor one or more events, make decisions based on those events that may include monitoring a different set of events and/or taking some other action such as dispensing medication or activating an alert.
The reaction of a patient to medications is never completely known, and this is especially true of patients taking multiple medications where the interaction of multiple medications is frequently not tested or not known.
Patients are often asked to complete lengthy questionnaires that include irrelevant data. This is an inefficient and annoying practice that results in an overwhelming amount of irrelevant data that is either ignored by medical personnel or results in crucial data being buried and missed amongst all the irrelevant data.
Properly diagnosing and managing remote patients often requires being able to see the patient or the patient's medical equipment to monitor vital signs and other physiological and biological data.
The price per bit of transferring data via wireless data networks is expensive. This limits the amount of data that can affordably be transferred for many applications.
Physicians are not always aware of the patient's activities and symptoms outside the clinic. For example, when a patient complains about chest pain, the patient may not remember or been aware of other indicators which may help diagnose the problem such as activities, blood pressure, body temperature, etc.
Another problem for drug clinical trials is the preference to monitor patients more closely outside the clinics in their normal life while taking the drug and/or following certain treatments, both of which are outside the control and access of medical personnel.
This invention provides a solution to all these problems with a system and process capable of capturing and monitoring a patient's biological and physiological data, the capability to interactively communicate remotely, and enable actions to provide patient care.